Charles Todd - Wings of Fire

He wondered if Mary Otley knew-or guessed-about Rachel’s feelings for Nicholas. He asked a few more questions that took him nowhere, then stood to go.

Rhodes, caught napping, leaped to his own feet before he was quite awake and scrambled to the attack. Rutledge sidestepped smoothly, and the little dog skidded to a halt by the chair, taking on its already well-chewed skirts instead.

But Mrs. Otley, looking up at Rutledge and ignoring the dog as if used to mock battles, said, “Of course I was back here in Borcombe when Nicholas nearly died. If that’s any help to you, sir. I wouldn’t want Miss Rachel to know of it, but she tells me you’ve an interest in such happenings at the Hail, and I wouldn’t want to be remiss in my duty. But if it serves no purpose, I’d as soon have it left a secret. If you wouldn’t mind.”

“Secret?” Rutledge repeated, as unprepared as Rhodes for the sudden shift in direction.

“Yes, it was kept very quiet at the time. No one wanted it talked about, but I suppose it doesn’t do any harm now, if you’re interested in the family’s history, as they say in the village you are. Though God knows why. They were always perfectly respectable people up at the Hall.”

“Tell me.” He spoke more sharply than he’d intended.

“There isn’t much to tell, actually. He was coming home to the Hall, late one night, Mr. Nicholas. He’d been visiting the rector-this was well before the war, oh, 1907 or thereabouts, and there’d had been rumors at the time about Mr. Nicholas leaving soon to see some of the ships being built up on Clyde Bank, in Scotland. Those liners everyone was talking about, and the prize for the Atlantic crossing speed record. Young Stephen told me he’d overheard Mr. Cormac saying he’d look into finding a place for Mr. Nicholas in one of the fleets, if he was interested. But I don’t know if that’s true or not, nothing came of it. At any rate, on the way home from Rector’s, Mr. Nicholas was stabbed by some drunkard. Too drunk to know what he was about, thank God, because the knife missed Mr. Nicholas’ heart and took a long slash out of his ribs instead. Dr. Penrith sewed him up, ordered him to stay in his own bed and not go wandering off to London or Scotland or anywhere else, and that was the end of that. I don’t think anyone knew about it except Miss Olivia and the doctor, and of course me, because the poor man dragged himself to my door when he couldn’t make it through the wood and up the hill to the Hall.”

“And the drunkard?”

“Oh, he was long gone away by the time Miss Olivia took some of the grooms out to hunt for him. She told them only that the man’d been making a nuisance of himself on the drive. I daresay he fled the minute he’d seen what he’d done. Drunk or not, he’d have known there’d be a hue and cry over it.”

“And Rachel never knew?”

“She was away, and Miss Olivia said she’d be here in a flash, worrying herself to death, and to no good purpose. I agreed, and never said a word to anyone. Mr. Nicholas ran a fever for a day or two, then began to heal. It wasn’t as if Miss Rachel was needed to help nurse him.”

“Did Nicholas get a good look at his assailant?”

“He said he was too rattled at the time to take much notice, except that the man was tall and thin and dressed poorly. Which was very unlike him, to my mind. Not one to lose his nerve, Mr. Nicholas. But men are strange sometimes, when it comes to pride. He wouldn’t have a fuss made over it. Someone dragged up before the magistrate for the attack, everyone talking-”

Rutledge agreed with her first comment. Nicholas-raided?

He thought it was much more likely that Nicholas knew exactly who had attacked him, and didn’t want to say…

And could that explain the gold watch fob in the small collection in Olivia’s closet? Had she tried to stop him from leaving her and the Hall?

He asked Mrs. Otley not to mention the matter to Rachel or anyone else for the time being, and left the house before Rhodes had finished trouncing the chair skirt and recollected his shoelaces.

Rutledge went off through the woods, not ready to return to the inn, restless with the complexities of the evidence in front of him, needing the physical exercise to clear away the temptations offered, to absolve Olivia of blame. It was still there, deep inside, although he knew it was wrong, a muddle of emotions from the war, from his loss of Jean, his insecurities, the persistent fear he might still be unready to do his job properly.

Olivia’s poetry had been an anchor for many men. Why hadn’t the woman herself lived up to the talent she’d been given?

He crossed the lawns of the Hall, noticing in the afternoon light that the house seemed to have changed since he came to Borcombe. Once it had seemed warmly welcoming, then haunted and alive with pain. Now-it was odd, but he could sense it strongly-there was merely emptiness. As if the occupants, man or ghost, had given up on the living and gone away. But it had only been a trick of the light, he told himself, that had once made the house seem to him so vital. And the fineness of the architecture, which led the senses astray.

He made himself remember instead the house that he’d just visited, the Beatons’ Victorian deception. A house without a soul, his father would have called it, because it had been built to reflect a passion, not as a thing in and of itself. The ghosts there would be just as fraudulent, wanting to be noticed as part of the decor, wandering in the turrets and along the battlements like figments of the style, not as figments of reality.

He smiled at the fanciful thought.

For a time he stood down by the shore, near the rocks where Brian FitzHugh had died. Watching the sea come in, listening to Hamish reminding him that what you wanted was not to be considered as proper evidence.

“And ye’re missing something, man! Ye’re wrapped up in your feelings, because that woman made sense of the war for you, and sense of love, and blinded you with her bonny words. Use your head! Ye’ll no’ find yon murderer in the sea, nor in the answers people gie you. And ye’ll no’ find it in Rachel Marlowe’s memory, mark my words. Ye’ll find it in black and white, or gie it all up for good!”

‘‘What about the clothes on the moor?” he asked, as gulls called overhead, blotting out the sound of his voice.

“Someone stripped the lad. That’s what it means. And why strip a corpse? To keep him from being identified.”

“No, they’d know, God help them, who the boy was. It was done for another reason. Not to prevent identification, but to confuse.”

“Confuse! D’ye no’ think that the mother of that child would know his flesh? Clothed or bare, rotting or whole, she’d know!”

“And if they found the clothes but not the boy-”

“She’d know those as well!”

Rutledge sighed. “True. So why strip the boy? Then bury the clothes in an oiled sack or cloth? Making them last as long as possible, rather than letting them rot. You’d think the sooner they rotted the better, as far as the killer was concerned. All right, who stripped the body? If I had the answer to that, I’d know the whole. And why the poem about the pansies? Pansies for remembrance. I don’t think anyone was likely to forget that wretched child!”

Nicholas or Olivia. That was his choice. Break Rachel’s heart-or wound his own by taking away that one small thing Olivia’s poetry had given him, a little space of comfort in a bloody terrible war.

He skimmed a few stones across the incoming tide, watching them skip and dance. Just as his evidence seemed to skip and dance. From one suspect to the other. And yet he knew, as strongly as he knew where he was standing at this instant, that it was not the two of them. Not working together. It had to be one-or the other. And he knew-God help him-he knew which.